Gift Economy

Gaston Leval's pamphlet 'Collectives in the Spanish Revolution' discusses some real-world attempts to abolish money in a modern(ish) context, particularly in the section 'collectivist book-keeping':

How you would generalise this over the whole planet is a valid question, as obviously it's never been done before (since pre-monetary societies were largely self-sufficient and there was no global society). my guess, inspired by the Spanish revolution is that everyone would be a member of a workers' council for their industry and a commune for their region, which would co-ordinate production, import and export of goods from that region in accordance with demand. as a member of the commune you'd be entitled to consume according to your needs; the condition of membership being required to contribute according to your ability.

the approach taken in the village of Naval (quoted above) where consumption is free but not unsupervised is one solution to people potentially free-riding or hoarding, but it does raise the so-called 'shiny dildo problem' - there are goods people might want but feel uncomfortable doing so publically. partly, you'd hope that social revolution will do away with such taboos, but it shouldn't be too difficult to include some degree of anonymity/confidentiality into a consumption process. not that i think dildo hoarding would be a serious threat to libertarian communism!

if we think what the village of Naval's approach would look like in the 21st century - their paper record keeping could easily be replaced with a swipe-card system that tracked consumption. this could easily be anonymised if necessary, but would provide a detailed breakdown of the consumption of goods and thus allow production to be planned accordingly on a 'pull' basis. if free-riding or hoarding was so serious a problem it impacted everyone's standard of living, there could be scope to investigate and place restrictions on people's consumption if they were say, stockpiling all the baked beans leading to localised shortages. that could be considered 'theft' and a limit placed on that person's baked bean consumption say, subject to proper checks and balances etc. i'm speculating here, and as the Spanish example suggests, this is a problem to be solved by experimentation in practice. i'm convinced it's possible though, the ingenuity and capacity for mutual aid of billions of people will see to that.

that's a really important point actually. if i remember rightly, Murray Bookchin talks about this in 'The Ecology of Freedom', and how commodity exchange produces atomised individuals, but gift exchange produces social reciprocity. it's a long time since i read bookchin though, and at the time a lot of the philosophical language went over my head (i should probably re-read it now i have a better grounding in that kind of thing actually).

if anyone's skeptical about the compatibility of this with 'human nature', there's a good book by Henrich et all called 'Foundations of Human Sociality', which addresses questions of cultural variation and universal reciprocal behaviour accross cultures with various studies. I haven't read 'Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundation of Cooperation in Economic Life' by some of the same authors, but it also looks interesting.

but if you're obligated to reciprocate with a gift of relatively equal material value, right away (or even later on), then if you don't produce anything of concrete value, you can't participate in the gift economy?
I mean if I go to a clothing store and get a nice suit, what will I be able to give in return as someone who studies ancient civilisations (or something of that sort, you get the point)?

I agree with this, but for all its alienating nature, commodity exchange is relatively unproblematic from the point of view of capital; if you have the money, you get the stuff.
This gifting thing is far more complex in terms of actually establishing these mutually beneficial long-term relationships.

I think it would be easier (or maybe the same thing and I'm confused) to simply give everyone in a given community in a given federation a card which says they are a productive member of society, this entitles them to what that community (and presumably fed) have decided are freely available (cheap to produce) goods and services - while extra luxury points would be added each month (and more to those who provided a specialist/difficult/unpleasant service or product, as determined by the community) to spend on more expensive and rationed goods and services.

I think this could be combined with social currency as well, where people could give you a "good karma" rating for doing good deeds which could be exchanged for material rewards at certain times...

People could petition their community if someone was freeriding and get them penalised and maybe even get their card torn up eventually for repeat offences.

what is a productive member of society? are you favouring those who can do work over those who cant? what if you're a child, pregnant, sick, or elderly and cannae work? Shouldn't scarce produce and things (i wont say commodities, cos i reckon they wont exist) be rationed according to needs, rather than work done? otherwise your kind of reinventing hierarchy if not classes, with those who do the most work at the top, receiving the bestest benefits of the social product.

and what about us communists who say that the whole point of a communist society is to get rid of capital's obssession with work, sacrifice, productivity? can we combine play with work? can we say: life is not about work? can we say: work is a means to an end, not an end in itself? i want to escape being a worker. if we get rid of the capitalist class we get rid of the working class too. it's not about everyone becoming a worker. (apologies if i am reading into things, just indulging in a wee rant).

ot oh. so people with good karma ratings float to the top of society, and those who dont go downhill. so if you're sick, or elderly, or a child, and cant give out good karma, your social currency is like, nothing. why this focus on deeds rather than needs? a focus on rewarding good deeds and karma sounds a bit christian to me, sorry.

you could run them out of town too, always a good form of anarchist coercion bad karma, man.

Khawaga, would commodity exchange still exist in a communist society? i get yr point but not yr terminology. there would still be exchange, but it wouldn't be mediated by money, and the exchange wouldnt involve commodities. [pedantry] there would be things rather than commodities.[/pedantry] also: agree that gift exchange would not be compulsory and barter like (as with most indigenous societies), but needs some complex inventory system to distribute the social product according to need and not deed.

so really there's no such thing as a "gift" at all

In addition to Mauss, Graeber, and Sahlins, I'd also recommend checking out C.A. Gregory's Gifts and Commodities and Jacques Godbout's The World of the Gift, and perhaps also Godelier's The Enigma of the Gift for a more structuralist approach. More generally, I recommend checking out the anthropological literature on gift exchange, as it can be a great counter to the dominance of market logic, demonstrating that it is certainly well within the bounds of 'human nature' for people to seek social status and recognition through giving rather than accumulating. However, it is also important to recognise that a lot of 'traditional' gift systems rely on fairly rigid forms of kinship-based social organisation.

Khawaga and Skraeling have already provided a pretty good summary of the Maussian approach to gift exchange. I'd also emphasise that in addition to the importance of obligation and reciprocity, this concept of the gift is based on the idea that unlike commodities they are inalienable i.e. ownership is never fully transferred, and thus gifts continue to represent the giver and mediate an ongoing relationship. Unlike commodities their value is primarily qualitative rather than quantitative, and this is a major reason why the debt they establish cannot ever be truly repaid. However, the nature of the relationship established by gift exchange varies widely, and can certainly be competitive, antagonistic, or hierarchical, depending on social and political context. Yet, as Graeber argues in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, it is the uneven and thus unresolved nature of gift exchanges that allows them to maintain social relationships, while more 'balanced' forms of exchange tend to close off and end such relationships.

Compared to fetishised commodities, the value of gifts is more explicitly about the relationships they establish between different individuals or social groups. However, while free from commodity fetishism, there are often other forms of fetishism at play in gift economies, displacing the human agency at work onto the (sacred etc) power of objects. This classical form of fetish is ironically less 'fetishised' than market commodities, as this power tends to remain closely identified with the social roles and relationships of those involved in the exchange. (Both Godelier and Graeber have quite a lot to say about this kind of fetishism, with Godelier emphasising the maintenance of the social order through displacement while Graeber focuses on social creativity).

'Gift economy' as a category really only makes sense in contrast to the market economy, as it encompasses a wide range of different exchange systems that share little beyond being personalised, non-market exchange practices. It can be particularly important to distinguish between generalised reciprocity and the more calculating or competitive forms of gift exchange. The former is probably more akin to the communist ideal of 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs', but also tends to presume an existing, defined community with strong social bonds (eg. kin or household group), while variations of the latter tend to be used to establish or maintain bonds between groups or individuals. Generalised reciprocity tends to be more egalitarian, obviously, but also less personalised and offering less room for individual autonomy. They often coexist, being used for different categories of goods and services and expressing different kinds of relationships.

It is certainly useful to look at the more traditional forms of non-market exchange, but they are not necessarily great models for a post-capitalist society; after all, they are based on radically different social conditions, technologies, and scales. So it is perhaps even more useful to look at the forms of gift exchange which have developed within capitalism. In The World of the Gift, Jacques Godbout makes a rather strong argument that capitalism itself has created the possibility for the 'free gift' (a concept which actually makes no sense in most pre-capitalist societies). Godbout argues that the modern gift is uniquely characterised by the 'altruistic' desire to give, that is, giving freely in order to establish community in the face of the alienating autonomy of the market.

However, I also think that gift exchange has an ambiguous role within capitalism. Various forms of gift exchange are alive and well, and while these may be outside the market they are not necessarily in conflict with capital. Indeed, capitalism absolutely relies on forms of gift-giving and reciprocity for the reproduction of labour, and also as an important element in consumption. The value of commodities often relies on their ability to be transformed into 'gifts'; the continued existence of various social forms of 'use-value' does not in itself challenge the dominant role of exchange-value, and is in fact necessary for the market system to function. More generally, capitalism requires the existence of non-capitalist value systems. Yet these subordinated and marginalised systems are also potential sources for the development of non- or even anti-capitalist movements and value systems.

I'm sure various forms of gift exchange will be important in any viable post-capitalist society—probably alongside less personalised forms of distribution—but that isn't really saying much about the specifics of social organisation. A problem with a lot of the literature on gifts vs commodities is a tendency to look at exchange in isolation from production and the wider social system, thus distorting the picture while also reproducing the dominant approach of bourgeois economic thinking. Still, while it is an oversimplification there may be some truth to the dichotomy in which gift=community and commodity=autonomy, so long as we keep in mind that community can be experienced as solidarity or oppression, and autonomy can be freedom or alienation. So, I would assume that a post-capitalist society will draw selectively on elements of both (as Khawaga suggests), but also hope that it will constitute a qualitatively new form of social organisation.